READINGS AND REFLECTIONS FOR : MONDAY, 10 AUGUST 2020

LAURENCE

Deacon and Martyr at Rome, 258

There is no contemporary account of Laurence’s death.  According to a tradition known to Ambrose a hundred years later, he was one of the seven deacons of Rome who was ordered by the magistrate to hand over the Church’s treasures.  Laurence collected together a number of poor and sick people and presented them to the magistrate, saying, “These are the treasures of the Church”. For this he was condemned to be burnt alive on an iron grating.  He became one of the most famous of all Roman martyrs and many churches are dedicated to him.

(Saints and Seasons, ACSA)

Collect :

Lord God,

your martyr Laurence defied his persecutors

and though his great love for you endured

the pain of death:

grant that we may love you daily more and more

and faithfully bear witness to the name of Jesus;

who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit

one God, for ever and ever.

Amen 

Ezekiel 1: 1 – 5, 24 – 28       Psalm 148: 1 – 4, 13 – 15     Matthew 17: 22 – 27 

In the first reading the prophet Ezekiel has a vision of God’s glory.  After encountering the Kabod or Glory of God, Ezekiel is trying to describe the experience for others.  He portrays the figure as something like a man – that is clothed in fire from the waist down while seated on something like a throne carved out of sapphire.   He compares the brilliance of the attire on the upper body of the figure to that of electrum, a gold and silver combination metal that was frequently used for coins in the empires of the ancient world.  Such an effort at comparison is doomed to failure since he also asserts that there really is no way to describe the Glory of God, as God appeared to him.  We ordinary mortals are left to assume that what God shows us, is a mere hint of the true glory that is beyond our capacity to perceive in our human limitedness.

In this Gospel account, Peter is asked by the religious leadership if Jesus (his teacher) intended to pay the temple tax.  What a first century reader would know would be that the very nature of that tax is intended as something like a hotel tax today – designed to get revenue from the pilgrimage trade (the tourist trade of the day), rather than the locals who are already heavily taxed.  Biblical scholars point out that between the land tax of the Romans and wrongly imposed temple tax of the High Priesthood, the ordinary people of the land had more than 80% of their meagre resources taken.  Jesus, as a native of the land, was by Jewish law exempt from the temple tax.  If we read the text through the lens of the Resurrection, we know that he is ULTIMATELY exempt from such a tax since he is what the temple represents, the manifestation of God’s Presence in the world. 

Jesus challenges their injustice and then tells Peter to catch a fish and cut it open.  In its belly is a coin of the realm – most likely made of some natural or artificial alloy of gold with at least 20% of silver, used for jewellery in ancient times.  (perhaps an allusion to Ezekiel’s vision).  The reader is reminded by this small display of power, that in Jesus is the Glory of God made present to us.  God, who is the source of all creation – the fish, the metal of the coin, the Temple, life itself – became subject not only to the limitations of being human, but to the  oppression of wealthy and powerful humanity who set themselves up as “false gods” by their arrogant use of power.  He did all this in order to turn about and save the oppressed and oppressors alike from sin.

So we are invited to SEE the glory of God, not only in the overwhelming vision of Ezekiel, but in the vision that Peter (and Matthew) give to us of Jesus, who is the ultimate disclosure of God. 

Let us Pray :

Jesus, give me the courage to make your presence felt in the world around me. Let me not be afraid to show that my faith in you, is the centre of my life and gives meaning to all I do.

Amen